City Still has Much Work Ahead to Ensure Safe Streets for All
Environment Hamilton - Ian Borsuk (Executive Director) and Adeola Egbeyemi (Project Coordinator)
The Hamilton community has much to celebrate lately. First, the province backed down on their ridiculous attempts to remove land from the Greenbelt around our city. Then they backed down from the even more shameful attempt to overrule local democracy and forcefully expand our urban boundary onto some of our last remaining Hamilton farmland.
It’s within this context that we must collectively renew our commitment towards building a vibrant and densifying city - one that is sustainably designed and keeps all who use our streets safe.
Urban sprawl all but guarantees increased vehicle traffic through our city. By concentrating our limited construction and planning efforts to sprawl, we end up inadvertently forcing new residents into car-centric lifestyles as they live further and further away from not only where they work and play, but even where transit service exists.
With the province pulling back (even if just briefly - as some keen observers fear) from the sprawl agenda, it’s vital that Hamilton ensures we’re building complete communities within our pre-existing urban boundary - communities in which individuals and families do not need to rely on private vehicles to get groceries, go to school, and to participate in other regular activities.
To reach this goal it’s not just about ensuring that people are in close proximity to where they need to go - it has to be safe for them to get there.
There were significant steps taken by the City during the last term of Council to calm traffic and create safer streets for residents in the downtown - in part due to an alarming and heart breaking stretch of injuries and deaths of pedestrians, and also in part due to the community outrage about these incidents.
It’s not every day residents can be seen outside City Hall with signs calling for the arrest of a “serial killer” (that was a street) - but that was the sentiment shared by many prior to the decision to begin to calm Main Street. While these efforts are absolutely necessary, as we have seen from incidents elsewhere in the downtown, it’s important we continue to push for safer design everywhere to prevent injuries and deaths.
It’s absolutely imperative from a perspective of environmental and financial sustainability that the City of Hamilton continue to densify. And with the province blinking on their sprawl speculator favouring agenda, there is a real opportunity for City Council to fulfill their shared priorities regarding growth. At the same time though, the status quo must still change.
Simply adding more units is not adequate on its own while we still have parking minimums and infrequent bus service. Simply adding more units is not adequate on its own when parents do not even feel safe letting their children walk a few blocks to school because of fast and dangerous street traffic.
The Hamilton community has won some serious gains when it comes to directing the overall vision of the future people hold for our City - but it’s at the ground level when individual development and traffic planning decisions are being made where the struggle remains. It’s far too easy to make exceptions here and there, to prioritize vehicle traffic over everyone else because “this one intersection” is just so frustrating for drivers.
Much like how it is for individuals and families to change their own behaviours and habits to start using active transportation more often - the City of Hamilton has some bad habits to shake too. It’s vital for us all to recognize that when the City leads on these changes it makes it easier and safer for the rest of us to do so as well.